Ocean of Information

While Sazzy was searching and annotating the list, I was looking through the notes Sazzy made about what Ralph and Tom had lectured. I also looked at the description of the drug that Ralph had introduced.

Looking at its product description, I could tell that it was something meant to be immediately consumed after exposure to these ingredients. But I didn't plan for people to consume anything. I just wanted to neutralize the poison in an unconsumed form. Does that mean these reactions didn't matter? Or is there another reason why they had to explain these to me?

Other than that, I tried to search up other explanations about chemical X, as well as the reaction chain they were talking about. Since it was found naturally, there may have been ways that the locals of these animals have neutralized the poison. Especially in the animal's meat if it is part of their cuisine.

Chick directed me to its scholarly article section, where there were a couple dozen journals that were talking about chemical X, in very technical language that wasn't better then how Ralph and Tom explained it. There were barely any news articles that covered chemical X.

Opening one of the articles, I gave it a quick read to find some sort of keyword to latch onto.

Reaction pathway...photosensitive...synapse interference...natural abundance!

The sentence right after the words 'natural abundance' described the chemical being found in animals that come from the galaxy where Hostia and Bellum were found. The article said that presence of this chemical was found in skeletons and remains of certain species of animals found on the planets in that galaxy. Maybe that was how the Colonizers had the idea of using this poison, or how they even recognized it in the first place. They must have been aware of the poison's existence beforehand!

The only problem was, all of the planets in that galaxy, especially Hostia and Bellum, didn't have any direct descendants left. There was a line several sentences down that said that the culture of most of those planets have been lost in the modern age, and that it has severely affected the speed of the research of chemical X, as well as its abundance. The article has even claimed that it can now only be produced synthetically, and that any trace of it being found is a sign of foul play being involved.

Skimming through the rest of the article, I failed to find anything more that was useful, and then switched to the next article. But all of them seemed to say the same thing. There is a severe lack of information on chemical X and that further research is always needed.

I closed my personal terminal and looked back at Sazzy's notes. There were a lot of terms I didn't understand, and even more that I have never heard of before. Reading through it one more time, I then sighed at how lost I felt. It was like I was drowning in a sea of information with nothing to grab hold onto.

Finished annotating all the chemicals, Sazzy drew my attention to them and I gave the list a look. Many of the notes were how they were used commercially and what drugs they were usually found in. There was also additional knowledge like their chemical properties and a 'chemical ID' which had a long string of numbers, as well as the many different aliases these chemicals were called by.

I skimmed through this list as well, trying desperately to make sense of all these pieces that I didn't know would fit together or not.

Giving another sigh, I heard the squeaky wheels of a cart and turned my head to see Ralph and Tom pushing a cart full of brightly colored bottles and containers to my research counter. Stopping right beside the counter, they unloaded several of the containers onto the counter.

"The names of all these chemicals are labeled on this white label on the lid, as well as the body of the container. You can also find their expiration date there as well as a code you can scan on your personal terminal that will direct you to the manual that you can reference for this specific chemical."

Ralph gave a brief talk on how to identify each chemical and what to do in the event I spilled any of them or I contaminated any of the bottles. He also mentioned the significance of the color of the container.

"Each of these containers are a specific color for a very good reason. They indicate what is its highest danger level. To give an example, chemical B is highly flammable, highly toxic and should never be breathed in, as well as having the additional problem of being incredibly corrosive. Touching it would melt away your skin immediately. You can see its risks by looking at these signs on its label. However, even though it's all three, it's flammability and corrosiveness is only at a level 3. Compared to its toxicity which is at a level 5, the other risks are relatively smaller. So chemical B's container is green."

Ralph picked up the green container holding chemical B and pointed to the thumb-sized symbols on the label. And even though Ralph mentioned only three risks, there were a total of seven symbols on the label.

"Toxic chemicals can only be accessed in incredibly well ventilated areas. Or everyone in the vicinity will die. So they have a special lock that only allows you to open the lid when it can sense there is enough airflow in the surroundings. As you can see right now, it's red, so we can't open it."

Pointing to a lock that wound around the entire section of the container where the cap and the container was supposed to meet, I saw a red light on a small protruded square.

While I looked at the container, Tom pulled my attention to him as he took out a circular device from the cart. He placed it on the floor, and it then shot out a beam of blue light that connected with the ceiling tile. An interface then appeared at the blue light and Tom pressed a couple of digits before the ceiling tiles above us started to light up and form a slightly blue colored box around my research table.

"With this barrier around us, we can now use the chemicals safely. It's a device that connects to the ceiling and sets up a customizable area inside the company that has a high airflow and allows us to work with the chemicals anywhere we need to."

Ralph pointed to the device, then pointed to the green container in his hands that now had a green light on its protruded square.

"Ok, now we can get started on how we want to create this poison neutralizer of ours. The good thing is that chemical X is already in the database of our company so we can use its information for a lot of our calculations. The bad thing is that since chemical X has not been extensively researched, we basically have to start from almost nothing to create something that can neutralize it."

Behind Ralph, Tom was transporting all the chemicals onto the counter and placing them in separate groups that didn't seem related to the color of their containers.

"Tom has a very picky preference about where he places things, so we can leave the sorting of them to him. In fact, he is the most experienced here in the company about experimenting and creating things from almost no information. He also was one of the creators of the drug that works against chemical X, so you can rest assured he is quite familiar with it."

Finished transporting and placing everything in its place, Tom patted himself on the back and finally came over to join us. Just in time to hear Ralph's last sentence.

"Ralph's right, you can count on me since I headed the research for that drug. In fact, Ralph here was also involved in it, although to a slightly smaller extent, so you can rely on us!"

Hanging an arm on both of our shoulders, Tom dragged us to the counter.

"I've arranged all of them into their safety groups so as long as you don't mix between the groups, we should be fine! The first step we have to do is to examine how each chemical reacts with each other and observe how many types of reactions, the conditions for these reactions, as well as the success percentage of these reactions. Well, most of the data for this has already been done because of the research and development stage for the other drug, so we can start with the next stage."

Tom pulled up a flow chart on his personal terminal and skipped right past the first few stages.

"Since we have just saved ourselves several months of work for now, we can move on to the more fun stages. Looking at the data we received from analyzing the poison, we can see that chemical X isn't the only chemical found in the mixture. There are also quite a couple of other chemicals there as well which may or may not influence chemical X. The good thing is that we have the data for these chemicals, the bad thing is that we don't have them in the context of chemical X so we need to observe and record that. That should keep us busy for the next four days. After that, depending on the result, we need to take different steps."

Tom pointed at his flow chart. The box he was pointing at, which I guessed was our current stage, split off into three separate routes. And it seemed like there were even more branches below that. It seems that we had a lot of work cut out for us.

And just like that, four days were gone.